Where is Amazon?

The New York Times story today on Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube provides a nice overview of how the deal came together, including an interesting tidbit that some of the discussions occurred over lunch at a Denny’s near YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, Calif.

But one sentence in the story caught me off guard. It reads:

“YouTube is Google’s first big acquisition after making a series of much smaller deals for companies, including Pyra Labs, creator of Blogger. Google now joins the Internet’s establishment — Yahoo, eBay and Amazon.com, among others — which have all made giant acquisitions to expand their businesses beyond their traditional trade.”

Amazon.com? Certainly, Yahoo and eBay have made big bets (eBay gobbled up PayPal and Skype, while Yahoo invested $1 billion in Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba.com)

But Amazon.com has been noticeably quiet on the acquisition front in recent years. In fact, its lack of appetite for big acquisitions was the subject of a story in the P-I last fall. According to the story, Amazon.com never paid more than $500 million for any one company. And most of its investments in startup companies occurred in 1999 and 2000, failed deals such as Kozmo.com, Pets.com and Living.com.

The point of the story: Amazon.com learned its lessons from the dot com bust and focused on internal efforts rather than outside acquisitions.